Many people love an old recording, but few take their love as far as Patrick Feaster. In my Science article Archaeologist of Sound, Feaster’s work as a sound historian understanding and restoring the earliest known recordings is explored. From the article:

And now Feaster, a friendly but intense 40-year-old with a slender build and a photographic memory for anything phonographic, had first crack at helping bring back to life the lost sounds of 130 years ago. His 2-month stint in the “nation’s attic” had turned up undreamed-of finds, including long-lost cylinders recorded at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and what may be the first-ever sound recording on a disk. Archives and artifacts, however, are only part of Feaster’s chosen work. Just as important, he says, is his mission of using modern technology to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds—some of them never intended to be revived.

…

By then, Feaster and colleagues David Giovannoni, Richard Martin, and Meagan Hennessey had formed FirstSounds.org, a group devoted to finding and disseminating the earliest sound recordings. The team had been nominated for a Grammy for its CD Actionable Offenses, a compilation of bawdy wax-cylinder recordings from the 1890s. Another CD, Debate ’08, reissued 22 recordings by presidential candidates William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan during the 1908 campaign—the first time sound bites were used in a presidential election, Feaster says.

…

“Today, we can listen—with a little work—to virtually any waveform we can see [Feaster] says. Two years ago, in some of his most far-ranging efforts to date, he applied his software to the musical notation found in a 10th-century manuscript of the Enchiriadis treatise, a medieval work on music theory. The result was a 7-minute sound file that Feaster calls “the closest thing you’re likely to hear to a 1000-year-old phonautogram.” Feaster has also applied software to “play” other historic musical notations—“as though a sound synthesizer were being programmed directly by medieval monks,” he says.

Science Writer

Award-winning science writer with a passionate interest in the intersection of popular culture and the physical sciences. Articles include features and news stories on the earliest known recorded sounds, an essay on Hubble Space Telescope photography and evidence suggesting the universe is a hologram.

Dubbed “the scoop machine,” by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Ron has been published in National Geographic, Nature, The New York Times, Science, Science News, Scientific American, and US News & World Report.